The second installment in our school SAT stats series is Stanford. That’s a lot of S’s, but getting in requires a lot of A’s. Or so you’d think. You’ll see at the bottom of this post that 53% of applicants to the 2009 freshman class had a GPA of 4.0 or above and 10% of them were accepted. In fact, the data suggest that GPA maybe isn’t the criteria given the most weight. The data below are for last year’s incoming freshman — data for the incoming 2010 freshman class aren’t available yet — but… Continue Reading

University of California schools are among the most popular with Excel students (and a lot of other students, too). Some 134,000 high school seniors and transfer students applied for Fall 2010 admission. Freshman applicants applied to an average of 3.5 campuses. What does it take to get accepted at one? UC provides a snapshot (pdf) of some of the more important factors, including a breakdown of SAT scores. Since that’s the reason you’re reading this blog, I’ve clipped in that information below. GPA rankings follow it. While test scores are of course important, they’re not… Continue Reading